ReddRadar
Agent skill
tech-debt
Identifies, classifies, and prioritizes technical debt. Use when auditing technical debt, assessing code quality, analyzing maintenance burden, or asking what's slowing us down. Produces categorized inventory with severity rankings, remediation roadmap, and fix recommendations.
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/philoserf/claude-code-setup/tree/main/skills/tech-debt
SKILL.md
Technical Debt Analysis
Systematic methodology for identifying, classifying, and prioritizing technical debt across a codebase. This skill diagnoses — it produces an inventory and remediation roadmap but does not modify code.
When to Use
- User asks about technical debt, maintenance burden, or "what's slowing us down"
- Starting a new engagement with an unfamiliar codebase
- Before a major refactor to scope and prioritize work
- Periodic health check on code quality
When NOT to Use
- Actually fixing the debt (use
refactor-cleaninstead) - Pure dependency/security audit (use
deps-auditinstead) - Performance profiling without structural concerns
- Single-file code review
Relationship to refactor-clean
These skills form a diagnose/treat pair:
- tech-debt = diagnose (what's wrong, how bad, what to fix first)
- refactor-clean = treat (how to fix it, verify quality after)
Run tech-debt first to build the inventory, then hand prioritized items to refactor-clean for execution.
Workflow
1. Scan
Walk the codebase and identify debt items using the debt categories.
- Glob for project structure and file sizes
- Grep for known smell patterns (TODO/FIXME/HACK, deeply nested code, large files)
- Read representative files in hotspot areas
- Classify each finding into its debt category
2. Assess
Score each debt item using the ROI framework.
- Evaluate impact across velocity, quality, and risk dimensions
- Assign a risk level (Critical / High / Medium / Low)
- Estimate effort to remediate (T-shirt size: S / M / L / XL)
- Note recurring cost if left unaddressed
3. Prioritize
Rank items into action tiers:
| Tier | Profile | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Quick Wins | High impact, low effort | Address immediately |
| Medium-Term | High impact, high effort | Plan for next cycle |
| Long-Term | Moderate impact, large | Roadmap for future |
| Skip | Low impact, high effort | Accept or revisit later |
4. Report
Deliver the analysis in structured format:
## Tech Debt Inventory
### Summary
- Total items found: N
- Critical: N | High: N | Medium: N | Low: N
### Debt Items
| # | Category | Item | Location | Risk | Effort | Tier |
|---|----------|------|----------|------|--------|------|
| 1 | Code | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
### Prioritized Roadmap
#### Quick Wins
- [items with rationale]
#### Medium-Term
- [items with rationale]
#### Long-Term
- [items with rationale]
### Recommendations
- [key observations and suggested next steps]
Output Format
- Debt Inventory — Categorized list with locations, risk levels, and effort estimates
- Prioritized Roadmap — Action tiers with rationale for ordering
- Recommendations — Key observations and suggested next steps
Reference Files
Detailed taxonomy and scoring guidance:
- debt-categories.md — Debt types with detection criteria and measurement thresholds
- roi-framework.md — Impact assessment, risk classification, and prioritization tiers
Recommended Agent Skills
Expand your agent's capabilities with these related and highly-rated skills.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
pre-release
Validates a project is ready to tag and ship. Use when tagging a release, cutting a version, shipping a package, or asking "are we ready to release?" Checks repo hygiene, CI status, docs, version sync, and build verification. Optimized for Obsidian plugins with fallback detection for other project types.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
local-issues
Reviews a codebase for bugs, design issues, and code cleanliness problems with specific file paths and line numbers. Use when auditing code quality, finding bugs, doing a code review, finding problems, or reviewing a project for issues. Creates issue files in `.issues/` directory.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
skill-improve
Generates prioritized improvement recommendations for Claude Code skills. Use when improving skills, enhancing customizations, or wanting actionable feedback on how to make a skill better. Provides impact/effort prioritization with specific fix suggestions.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
release
Executes the final release workflow for Obsidian plugins after pre-release checks pass. Use when tagging a release, publishing a version, or shipping an Obsidian plugin. Bumps version via bun run script, creates git tag, pushes to trigger GitHub Actions, and updates GitHub release notes from CHANGELOG.md.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
skill-quality
Scores Claude Code skills (1-5) across 6 weighted quality dimensions aligned with official Anthropic docs. Use when evaluating skill quality, rating skills, scoring customizations, comparing skill effectiveness, or checking if a skill follows best practices. Produces per-dimension scores with evidence, weighted totals, quality tier classification, and actionable improvement recommendations.
philoserf/claude-code-setup
obsidian-cli
Interacts with Obsidian vaults using the Obsidian CLI to read, create, and manage notes, tasks, properties, tags, and more. Also supports plugin and theme development with commands to reload plugins, run JavaScript, capture errors, take screenshots, and inspect the DOM. Use when the user asks to interact with their Obsidian vault, manage notes, add to daily note, find notes about a topic, check tasks, append to a note, query the vault, list tags, list files, manage bookmarks, check sync status, view file history, use templates, query bases, run QuickAdd, perform vault operations from the command line, or develop and debug Obsidian plugins and themes.
Didn't find tool you were looking for?